CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (20 page)

In a while he leant forward and filled the vessel full of inky wine. Rather than dim the spectrum in the glass, the blackness seemed to bring it out. Gold shot through the other tints like benign lightning.

Razved sighed. He had put away his woes.

He placed his fingers upon the rim of the goblet. At once, it sang for him. He could hear again a woman’s voice in the notes, clear as a silver bell, and as he kept just one finger on the vessel, the melody—and melody it was—went on and on. Razved was not afraid. Unlike the shoddy glass-seller, he was royal, a warrior of a warlike and powerful line—although he had never ridden to battle, nor seen what battle may produce aside from valour. The glass was neither evil nor any threat. It was enchanted, and enchanting. It was a delicious toy the gods had sent him, in recompense for all the other frustrations of his days.

Unable any longer to detain himself, the Prince now put both his hands on the goblet. Intoxicating heat raced through his arms and filled his body, as he drew the brim towards his lips. He drained the wine, and the act of drinking became instead the act of kissing, while the singing notes entered his brain, and floated there like iridium feathers.

He found he had lain back, the cup held firm against his heart. And then it seemed the cup too had taken hold of
him
. Female arms, slender and strong, encircled his body. For an instant he glimpsed, lifted above him, a maiden made of flames and waters, flowing down on him in waves and foam and sparks, more sinuous than any serpent. Then a mouth famished as his own fastened on his lips, a tongue like smoothest myrrh and ice-hot quicksilver, drank deeply. Against him in his delirium he felt the movement of a frame that was softness and succulence, pliable and limber as a young cat’s—but all this, the plains of skin, the pressure of slim muscle, the downfall of shining hair—even the narrow hands whose tips were like bees, the flawless breasts whose tips were like buds—all this was cool and composite, and made all,
all
of it, of
glass
.

Yet still Razved feared nothing. As his hands swept over the crystal curves of a phantasmal yet actual shape, as he drowned in the silver notes of a song that had, as yet, no words, as he began to ride in the primal race of desire, not one qualm interrupted Razved’s intense and scalding pleasure. For it did not trouble him
she
was all of glass, and that
she
flamed with shades of flowers and gems, and her tongue was of glass, her lips and hair, her little feet that gripped him, glass that kissed, caressed, and sang in ecstasy. Even her centre, the core of her glory, that too, where now he lay, fixed and explosive as a sun,
that
was formed of glass. And it rippled and embraced and grew molten, better than any human vessel; wine and darkness; jasper, asphodel: fire, ash, sand.

2. The Second Fragment

That very morning they had entered the expanse of the terrible desert known as the Vast Harsh, Jandur the glass-seller received an omen. He did not, at the hour, much consider it, but later it came to him he had been awarded one of those useless portents the gods tended to throw before mankind. What the omen presumably was, had been a solitary black vulture crouched on a sycamore, which weirdly held upright in its beak a shard of glass. This caught the light and flashed, amusing many who saw it. But they, and Jandur, soon forgot, since a mile or so later the desert began.

There lay before the caravan now countless miles of that inimical landscape, which separated the more abundant lands from the towns and cities of the north and east. And though provided with all necessities, none of the travellers viewed the desert prospect with much joy. The Harsh was famed not only for its personal cruelties, but for those of various men driven out there, and making their desperate livelihoods by the robbery and murder of passing human traffic. Well-armed guards had joined the caravan at Marah, the last town on the desert’s edge.

The Harsh opened to receive them, grinning.

Jandur journeyed glumly among the rest.

By day the caravan wended, though sheltering sometimes at noon, when the predatory eye of the sun centred the sky. Once there it turned both heaven and earth into a furnace any glass-maker might have valued.
Perhaps
, thought Jandur then,
the gods also are glass-makers. The earth is their kiln and
we, mortals of silicious sand, suffer, turn and burn in this
sunfire, and likewise the flames of pain and sorrow, in order to
become creatures as pure and beautiful as glass.

But really he was well aware that people rarely grew beautiful or pure through suffering and burning. Normally ill-treatment made them worse, and wicked. Those that did achieve virtue no doubt might have become just as wonderful, even if they had
not
had to suffer, or to burn.

At night the caravan spread itself out like an exhausted yet demanding beast. It lit torches and fires, cooked its meals, sometimes told stories or danced, frequently bickered, argued, or even came to blows. Above, the myriad stars blazed bright.
If each were a glass,
thought Jandur,
what a fortune they would
make for those that formed them. But alas, when they fall
, he added to himself, seeing one which did,
they shatter.

Jandur had himself never made a single piece of glass. He only
sold
glass, but that in quantities. In the very next town they would come to, which was called Burab, and which still lay ninety days and nights across the Harsh, Jandur’s brother-in-law had charge of the family’s second glass-makery. He was a quarrelsome brute, dark red from heat; and scarred all over with the white bites of burns. But Jandur had already enough stock, and thought he would not need to trouble his brother-in-law. Which thought cheered Jandur in the desert, even when jackals howled, or the dust-winds blew.

* * *

Despite the reputation of the Harsh, they met no robbers. Probably any robbers spied them first and found their numbers, and their armed escort, off-putting. Meanwhile, on a certain evening, they reached one of the few oases that served the waste.

This was a poor enough specimen. A handful of spindly trees led to a well no bigger than a washtub, the margin spiked with black rushes that discontentedly chittered.

Leaving his servant to go for fresh water, Jandur dismounted from his mule and took a walk among the stunted trees. The sun was already low and veiled in sandy gold, and a reluctant breeze smoked along the dunes. The impromptu caravanserai was being settled for the night, cookfires breaking into red blossom. Jandur went up to a little rise, idly following the prints of some now-absent, small desert animal. From here he looked about at the world, as mortals did and yet do, both pleased and displeased with it, suspended in the quiet melancholy of dusk.

“Where is the glass-maker?” shouted a baleful voice behind him.

“I do not know,” muttered Jandur. But he turned nonetheless.

And there on the rise with him perched a most ungainly and uncouth female figure. She was clad in a mantle of vulture feathers. More, her long and ragged hair, lucklessly dark as was the hair, they said, of demons, was stuck with other such feathers. On her wrists and at her long, thin neck were ornaments of what Jandur, not illogically, concluded to be vulture bones. She smelled of vultures too, a smell that was of chickens, and of carrion.

If he had been going to admit to an acquaintance with glassware, perhaps now he thought better of it. But this was all in vain. For she announced immediately, “You are
he
. You are the one named Janpur or Jinkor, a glass-maker and vendor of such.”

“What, assuming I am he, would you have with him?” inquired Jandur.

The female ruffled her feathers. It was difficult to be sure, when she did this, if rather than a mantle, they were not actually growing from her skin. “I am Morjhas. I perambulate the desert. I have no trepidation in the Harsh, for my powers bring me all I need.”

She was a witch. Jandur nodded politely.

But she reached forward and thrust her skinny talon of a finger at his breast. “Come you with me. I will show you a strangeness. I am bound to do this, for my talent carries with it a certain onus. A strangeness, I say. And what you do thereupon I shall advise you.”

“I may not leave the caravan,” protested Jandur. “If you are often here, you will know the place abounds in villains.”

“What care I for villains? They are all afraid of Morjhas—and rightly. Those who annoy me,” she added, fixing Jandur with a tar-black eye, “regret it. If you behave, you will be safe enough in
my
company.”

* * *

They flew.

He had not, and maybe he might have done, expected this. But the bird-hag lifted him straight off his feet and bore him away. He suspected he screamed, but none heard him over the din of the caravan; twilight doubtless screened the view. And she—she spread her wings and rushed both of them on.

However, they did not travel a very great way. The ‘strangeness’ Morjhas meant to reveal lay only some half mile from the camp.

At first, having been landed, Jandur gaped about him.

No trace of sun remained, only the huge translucent violet dome of nightfall, where they were lighting the million cobalt, ferrous, and pewter cookfires and torches of the stars.

The vulture witch pointed with her eldritch claw.

“
See there.
”

Some sixty or seventy paces off rose a mesa, scorched black by weather, and below, as elsewhere around, lay sand, slightly patched paler or darker, denoting seemingly depth, variance of consistency, or only shadows.

“At what do I look? That rock?”

“
Hush
, fool. Look and listen and learn.”

So there they stood, and the night gathered all about, glowing as always in such open places, yet also black behind the stars. And coldness came too, for the desert, even the Vast Harsh, presented two faces, furnace by day and iceberg by night.

Jandur was frightened, but not out of his wits. He stared at the patch of sand below the mesa that his unwanted guide had indicated, and in a while he started to note a disturbance in it. A dust devil appeared to be at work there, but one which did not move from its origins. And after a time, the motes which circled upward and round and round commenced also to shine.

“Is it a ghost?” asked Jandur in a whisper.

“
Hush
,” said the witch.

And exactly then the spinning busyness began to chime. An eerie carillion it was, bereft and lorn, like the cries of the wolves and jackals which prevailed in the desert. Yet too it had profound beauty, an insistent music. Like a song it seemed, lacking words, though once perhaps words had belonged to it, a song of longing and loss that only a poet might create, and a human throat emit.

This uncanny and emotive recital continued for several minutes. Then came the night wind, and breathed on the spot, as a mother might with a weeping child. And the song ended, and the dust of the sand drifted down. It slept, whatever it had been, whatever it was. And silence returned, composed of the shift of the dunes, the sigh of the flimsy wind.

Morjhas spoke. “There, then.”

“But
what
then?” asked Jandur.

“I cannot tell you. I, even
I
, do not know. But it cries out, does it not? I cannot ignore that cry, nor shall you.”

“But what am
I
to do with it?”

“
Fool
of a
fool
,
son
of fools to seventeen generations,
father
of fools and
grandsire
of
imbeciles
!” ranted the vulture-witch. “Are you a glass-maker? Gather up the sand there, take and make it into glass, for glass is made with sand and fire. Take it and shape it and see what
then
it does—for long enough it has lain and lamented here, unheard by any but myself and now you, O
fool
.”

“Take and make—” cried Jandur in horror, for he did not want any part of this scheme.

“Take and make. For my powers are generous and I must be kind in turn to the tragedies of the Harsh. But you I will punish if you fail in this. Heed me, Jumduk, if so you are named. Either scoop up the sand there and have it worked, or I will send my minions to smash every item of your saleable glass, even within the cosy caravan. I will begin, O
fool
, with a certain mirror—” here the vulture held up her wing and gave a screech, and from far away—about half a mile in fact—the appalled merchant seemed to detect a glacial splintering. “I will smash all and everything, until you have dug up that place of sand which sings and sobs. Go now. Hasten back to the camp and get your slaves and your spades, for with every second you delay, another delicacy
breaks
. Be assured also, that if the sand is not then rendered to glassware before three more months elapse, I will break anything you may have left, or thereafter acquire! You had best believe this.”

Jandur was uncertain if he had only gone mad, but he credited every word. He bolted for the camp, and endlessly along the route as he ran, he heard the shattering of glass—the whole while becoming louder and louder.

* * *

Indeed, Jandur’s bivouac lay in some confusion, when he reached it. People stood about amazed, and bits of glass lay around sparkling prettily in the firelight, but there was a deal of shrieking and praying too. “Vile winged shadows fell upon your wagon, Jandur!” some explained, hurrying gladly to convey bad news. “We heard the vandalism upon your wares but dare not enter! No other among us is attacked—only you, poor Jandur. Whatever can you have done to incur this supernatural wrath?” While as a background to their verbiage, yet other breakages sounded.

But Jandur paid no heed. Seizing his servant, two spades and some sacks, Jandur pelted back again, now on foot, across the desert. Regaining the spot where the dust had lifted and sung, the two men dug and transposed sand for all they were worth, until they had filled the sacks.

No sign of the vulture-witch remained, and truly the general site was so unremarkable that, saving the mesa, it was probable Jandur would not have found it again. A large dug hole now marked the dunes. Yet soon enough the sands would refill it.